Fairewinds has fielded a number of questions regarding the removal of the fuel rods from the spent fuel pool in Unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi. Today's video shows Arnie debunking TEPCO's animated film point by point, and highlights the issues TEPCO will have removing the fuel rods. TEPCO needs to be removed as the organization overseeing the cleanup of the site prior to the removal of the fuel rods.

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FAIREWINDS ENERGY EDUCATION – PODCAST – TEPCO Fuel 1 11-14-13

AG: Hi. I’m Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds and it’s the middle of November, 2013. Tokyo Electric has announced that it’s going to be removing the nuclear fuel from inside the spent fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi unit 4. They released an animated feature film to show, in their opinion, just how easy this task is going to be. What I thought I’d do is show you based on my experience as someone who ran a division that built nuclear fuel racks, that this really isn’t an animated feature film, but in fact, it’s more of a fantasy cartoon. There’s some serious problems that Tokyo Electric is trying to sweep under the rug with this video and I thought I would address them for you so we’re all more prepared for what the future might entail. “A milestone is being reached in the recovery of Fukushima Daiichi.

For the first time since the accident, spent fuel will be removed from the damaged building and stored in a safer, more secure way in these specially designed containers.” Well, the feature film begins with a pristine environment that’s squeaky clean and all of the surfaces are vertical and horizontal. This building was hit by an earthquake and an explosion. And I can assure you that there’s not many surfaces that are vertical and horizontal any more. What’s underneath that shrink wrap is a contaminated building that’s been distorted by an earthquake. And I wanted to show you to start this series exactly what that building looked like before they put the shrink wrap on.

Video clip: “Moving the spent fuel out of the damaged reactor building and into safe permanent storage leads the groundwork for moving forward with cleanup and remediation of the damaged building. Getting the damaged reactor building ready for this moment is the result of months of planning and the development of innovative solutions.”

AG: The first problem at Fukushima Daiichi isn’t the physical condition of the plant. It’s the physical condition of Tokyo Electric. Before Tokyo Electric begins to remove the fuel, the Japanese government should remove Tokyo Electric from the process. Their staff aren’t engineers. Their staff are operators that are used to running nuclear reactors. But the problems facing Fukushima Daiichi go well beyond that into a realm where no one has gone before. To rely on their expertise is a serious miscalculation of what the problems in the future might be. We just have to look at the last 2-1/2 years at the site to understand exactly how outgunned Tokyo Electric is moving forward. We have leaky tanks, Pacific Ocean contamination and chronic problems with rats in electrical systems. This is a company that’s over its head and needs to be replaced.

Video clip: “Although reactor 4 happened to have been shut down for inspection at the time of the earthquake and no fuel was in the reactor, spent fuel was being stored in pools designed for that purpose. When the reactor building exploded in the events following the great East Japan earthquake and the tsunami that followed, debris fell into those pools and the instability of the building made removal of the fuel ordinarily something that TEPCO has done safely and routinely more than 1,200 times, a challenge.”

AG: This video shows the pristine nuclear fuel racks. And you’ll notice that the nuclear fuel, which are those little tubes, are in a bundle grouped together, and in a box. Well, that box has neutron absorbers in it. My sources inside Tokyo Electric have told me they have no confidence that there’s any boron left inside those neutron-absorbing plates. There’s two reasons for that. (4:09) First off, the plates were never designed for boiling water and we know that right after the accident, the water boiled violently. The second thing is the plates were never designed for salt water. So the extra heat plus the extra salt means you can have no confidence that there’s any boron left in those boron absorbers. What does that mean? That means that these wrappers were designed to capture neutrons to prevent a nuclear chain reaction from occurring inside of that spent fuel pool. If there’s no assurance that there’s any boron left in those wrappers, then the only protection for the public is that Tokyo Electric has to add an enormous amount of boron to the water. Nuclear plants are designed with a defense in depth. There were wrappers and there were boron. They’ve lost the defense in depth and in fact now there’s just one barrier between an inadvertent criticality, a chain reaction in the fuel pool, and that’s that hopefully the boron concentration in that water will be enough.

Video clip: “First, we used more than 20 different kinds of specialized equipment to remove all kinds of debris. Some of the smaller pieces of debris will be removed along with the fuel.”

AG: There’s a major problem with that statement that some of the smaller pieces of debris will be removed with the fuel, and that’s that the smaller pieces of debris will cause friction. And as Tokyo Electric tries to pull that fuel out, it will bind up and likely snap.

Video clip: “We also check for corrosion that might have been caused by the seawater used to cool the reactor and our inspections showed that the material remains strong enough to be lifted out.”

AG: This paragraph is about the biggest misnomer in the entire Tokyo Electric presentation. The picture they’re showing you is of a new fuel assembly. A couple months ago, Tokyo Electric pulled two new fuel assemblies. But for them to claim that a new fuel assembly that’s never been in a nuclear reactor is the same structural integrity as a spent fuel assembly that’s spent four years in a nuclear reactor, there’s a serious misrepresentation. In fact, as nuclear fuel operates in a nuclear reactor, it degrades; it becomes brittle. So their comparison here between a new fuel bundle and what they’re going to be removing – spent fuel bundles – is a serious mistake and really the record needs to be set straight by Tokyo Electric that this is really a major inaccuracy.

Video clip: “We also developed and installed a unique protective cover for the building and stabilized the building to prevent any further damage to the fuel pool and also to protect the safety of the workers.”

AG: This picture shows that the gray structure is brand new. And that’s an indication that the building was severely damaged, either by the explosions or equally likely from the earthquake that occurred right before the explosions. The large canister that’s ultimately going to be lifted to the ground weighs about 100 to 110 tons. The building as it existed is so damaged it can’t handle a large canister. Tokyo Electric had to build a new building in order to hold the weight. So that’s an indication of just how structurally damaged the building is. The second misnomer here is that Tokyo Electric shows the wrapper, basically a Kevlar wrapper just like you put on a boat, to be put in place to protect the safety of the workers. That’s really not true. As the fuel assemblies are being pulled, it’s possible that they can snap and release radioactive gases. What that building is really there for is to capture those gases and send them up a high stack as opposed to having a ground level release.

Video clip: “The machinery used for the extraction has also been modified to meet this unique challenge. Failsafe wiring and redundant braking systems are used, along with sensors to prevent weight overloads and excess stresses.”

AG: You’ll recall earlier I talked about how the friction from all of the rubble that’s in the pool is going to make it harder to pull the fuel. Well, excess stresses that Tokyo Electric talks about is really because the box is distorted. And it will be very difficult to pull that fuel element out. It’s almost like you had a pack of cigarettes. If the pack is not distorted, the cigarettes come out easily. But if you squeeze the pack or distort it sideways, then the cigarettes don’t come out anywhere near as well. What Tokyo Electric is admitting there is that as they pull up the fuel, they very well may get to a situation where the fuel sticks and is too hard to pull any further. Hopefully at that point they can push it back in, but that’s not a given, either, and they may wind up with elements that are partially in the rack and partially out of the rack. To pull any further or any harder might snap the element and release radioactive gases.

Video clip: “And all the removal equipment has been made strong enough to withstand even the unlikely event of another earthquake as strong as the March, 2011, quake.”

AG: What they’re not saying here is that the old building isn’t strong enough, and that if an earthquake occurs before that fuel pool is empty, there’s serious structural problems in the old building. While they’ve built a new building to withstand the original earthquake conditions, what they’re basically also saying is that the old building can’t withstand that earthquake a second time. That’s why it’s critical to get that fuel out as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, I don’t think the right people are doing the job.

Video clip: “With all these precautions in place, we can move forward with removing the fuel. To remove it, a crane positions a grappling assembly carefully over the fuel and slowly lifts it out of the pool. Once the fuel has been lifted out, it is lowered into special casks. These casks will be sealed and moved to a safe and secure storage underwater location on the Fukushima NPS site.”

AG: Tokyo Electric is showing two cranes in this picture. The smaller one on the bottom of the picture can only lift a couple of tons and it’s designed only to lift individual fuel bundles. The larger one is designed to lift heavy canisters, but you’ll notice that it’s connected to the gray structure which they built after the earthquake. It’s another admission that the building can’t withstand the weight of the canister and they had to find an alternate way to remove the fuel.

Video clip: “Storing it underwater shields any radiation from escaping and keeping it here on the site avoids any need to transport it on roads or railways.”

AG: There’s a couple problems with this representation. First off, that there’s no place else to send the nuclear fuel right now. Tokyo Electric has been storing fuel on site for 20 or 30 years in a large spent fuel pool that’s on the site. But equally important is that this fuel is contaminated with salt. And when it’s placed in another fuel pool, it’s likely to contaminate the other bundles with salt as well. So the reason that fuel is staying on site is that the last thing Tokyo Electric wants to do is to contaminate another fuel pool at another site with the salt from Fukushima Daiichi.

Video clip: “This transfer from one form of underwater storage to another will not lead to any radiation exposure to workers or anyone else.”

AG: In the perfect world of this cartoon, the workers will not receive any extra exposure. But as has happened in the United States, these fuel pool bundles can break. And when they break, they will release radioactive krypton 85 gases into the fuel pool area, into that envelope that’s surrounding the fuel pool. Workers will have to be evacuated and those gases will have to be exhausted up the stack into the atmosphere throughout Fukushima Prefector.

Video clip: “The movement of the fuel to permanent storage will enable us to move to the next phase of the cleanup and safe decommissioning of reactor 4, a milestone in the process of recovery.”

AG: Once they’ve got the nuclear fuel out of Fukushima Daiichi unit 4, decommissioning the reactor’s not necessary, at least not right now. Their money would be better spent moving onto 3, 2 and 1 to prevent the radiation in those plants from becoming airborne and contaminating not just the Prefector but potentially the entire country of Japan. I don’t know why they’re considering decommissioning unit 4 except as a publicity issue to show that one of the units has been dismantled. This is an easy job in comparison to the problems at Fukushima Daiichi 1, 2 and 3. And I think their management, attention and money would be better spent getting the nuclear fuel out of those 3 reactors instead of cosmetically removing unit 4 from the site.

Video clip: “As the cleanup and remediation moves forward, we remain committed to sharing information like this video with you.”

AG: Anybody who’s been following the Fukushima Daiichi accident since it happened has to understand that Tokyo Electric has never been committed to getting information to the public in a timely and accurate manner. I had dinner with Japanese former Prime Minister Kahn a couple weeks ago and we talked about, in his role as the Prime Minister during the nuclear accident, how difficult it was to get accurate information. And he told me two things. He told me he couldn’t trust the regulator in Japan; and he also couldn’t trust Tokyo Electric. His exact words were, “The information I received was neither timely nor accurate.” So Tokyo Electric has been committed to protecting Tokyo Electric, but not really sharing information with the public since this accident began.

AG: So here’s the bottom line for the cleanup at Fukushima Daiichi. Tokyo Electric doesn’t have the technical expertise to do this job right. Before removing fuel, we should remove Tokyo Electric. The second piece of that, though, is that Tokyo Electric never had the money to do this right. They’re too small to afford a cleanup of this magnitude. The Japanese government’s got to step up and admit that this is a half a trillion dollar problem, and the people in the country of Japan are on the hook to pay for it. There’s not enough assets in Tokyo Electric to ever solve this problem.

The third piece is that international experts have to be brought in. This is too big a problem for any one company to solve. But lastly revolves around you and me. We’ve got to provide citizen oversight to make sure this job is done correctly.

If we leave it to the nuclear priesthood, they’ll circle the wagons and not tell us everything that’s going on there. I’m particularly concerned about the dose that people in Fukushima Prefector are receiving and the health effects that are being presently hidden. Citizen oversight is the key to make the cleanup of Fukushima work. Fairewinds has been a beacon of information in an age when the nuclear priesthood does not want information released. And I know that you appreciate this because you’re watching these videos.

You can help us to continue to be that beacon in the fog in 2014. A donor has stepped forward and has offered us $2 for every dollar that other people give us. That means that your one-dollar donation makes three when it’s matched by this donor. It’s an incredible opportunity. Fairewinds is a non-profit and I hope that you’ll consider a donation so that we can continue to move forward into 2014 with the high quality productions that you’re used to seeing.